Things will of course progress from benign, to useful, to something beyond our consideration.
Would the DARPA originators of the internet (mainly Al Gore) have envisioned what we do with it today?
The ARPANET people never considered YouTube and all of those things that, today, many consider ubiquitous. There are people saying that high speed internet is a right. Next time you look around, it
will be a right.
My objection to the book
1984 was the ever present government surveillance. But there was no internet at all when I read 1984 (yes, ARPANET was around, but I don't think that it was used by civilians). Cameras were BIG and expensive. No way that stuff could happen.
For the people that think Kindle (et al) is providing your reading list (and those sections that you bookmark or highlight) to a company (Amazon in this case) let me ask "Do you think that your (any) government is better?
As a kid I used to scour the library for info on explosives - all I wanted to do was make my own firecrackers.
In the future, if not today, they (the infamous and nefarious THEY) will pick up on that and brand me a subversive, terrorist, or just an out and out criminal.
If you read books with a homosexual theme do you keep the books private? When I was young, not only was homosexuality a crime, it was a listed mental illness. The "cure" could even include a lobotomy or electroshock "therapy".
Variations on a theme. In the book
Fahrenheit 451 they burned all books. But suppose "THEY" wanted to find people that they thought were a danger to the public? Using your reading list could be of great use to "THEM".
Assuming that "THEY" will eventually be able to identify you on the internet. What do you intend to do to keep your reading private? Go back to paper books? Just don't use a credit or debit card. Don't even use a library card.